If you guys like solving brute forcing games, you can solve this series of puzzles to win prizes totaling about 970 BTC (45 million USD): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5218972.0
For example the next unsolved puzzle in the series is #66 which is a Bitcoin private key with 66 unknown random bits. If you crack it you win 6.6 BTC (300 000 USD). It goes all the way to #160 which has a 16.0 BTC prize.
Puzzle numbers multiple of 5 (#65 #70 #75 etc) have had their public key published in a transaction on the blockchain, so it's possible to take some shortcuts such as the Pollard's kangaroo ECDLP solver. The next unsolved "multiple of 5" is #130 with a 13.0 BTC prize (600 000 USD). You need approximately 2^65 operations to solve it.
The most recent win was puzzle #125 solved on 2023-07-09 by an anonymous person who collected the 12.5 BTC. One can see their tx here: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1PXAyUB8Zo... They probably used 200-300 GPUs for about 2-4 months to crack it, based on the known performance of existing ECDLP solvers such as https://github.com/JeanLucPons/Kangaroo
I know there are problems, but PoW seems like such a good baseline for discoverability on socially enabled sites
Well this site got me to write my first ever C program to generate low hashes, and by the time I get it working, I go back to the site to learn that the lowest hash now starts with 10 zeros. (!)
I don't think my lowly little Mac CPU will ever compete with that.
But hey. First C program.
I did my own r/place too, but with React and Express, here is a demo: https://cubes.fly.dev/
Of course is opensource: https://github.com/skorotkiewicz/Cubes
It's a websocket, but easily its possible to make this with p2p.
Similar idea with boring tech ;)
How do different peers discover each other? And is all the data lost once no one is visiting the site?
Oh my god, I had this same idea (but never made it! probably wouldn't know how to implement proof of work).
I thought this was pretty specific... trust the internet to show me I have never had an original thought.
Wow this really fun. Nice web client too. Makes me want to relearn CUDA...
I was just thinking, I wish that silly thing Reddit did was done again somewhere less popular but with a truly ridiculous waste of computation also.
How can I use this to spy/leak/share?
(not asking for any friend - but seriously, do these have exploitation vectors?)
Oh no, the French flag is growing :)
OOOh, climate destroying shitcoin-inspired /r/place ?
I'll just take https://paint.adminforge.de/?lang=en as FLOSS and not climate destroying thankyouverymuch.
The one problem with this approach is that it gives one guy with a big GPU (or even an ASIC) a huge advantage over "casual" users (e.g. mobile web). You could perhaps make the gap smaller by using one of the "ASIC-resistant" mining algorithms?
By the way, for making more efficient mining algorithms, it would be nicer if the nonce is on the end of the message, aligned to a sha256 block. As is, it encourages someone to set the real nonce to a fixed value, and append their own garbage (for the text message version at least, I suppose for the other formats it doesn't matter).
Edit: it would appear that your current mining algorithm is pretty inefficient. I seemingly managed to out-hash everyone with just 32 leading zeroes, taking a few Python-CPU-minutes to find. To cement my place further, I spent a few GPU-minutes to find 40 leading zeroes.
The current "best hash in grid" has 28 leading zeroes. If we pessimistically take that as the average, and there are 2^10 pixels, it would take 2^38 work to flood the whole grid right now. If I spent my GPU-minutes on grid pixels rather than the text, I could have flooded the grid 4 times over.